From The Magical Prince's Mouth

Anyone who talked to me during late 2007 knew a few key things about me:

1. I was horrendously miserable

2. I was not keeping up with my fans very well

3. I had kicked all of my most dangerous habits except caring about a horrible person I loved

4. The only childish joy I really got came from bottles of Jones Gingerbread Man soda (better than alcohol, right?)

5. School was not going well and I was seriously reconsidering my mistakes and career choices


There was one thing, however, that actually has some pertinence to why you read this blog:


I was in the middle of writing the first set of Bubblegum Octopus songs I was really proud of, for an album I called From The Magical Prince's Mouth.
Unlike in the past, I barely showed anyone my material as I worked on it, so it's remained quite hidden in general.
The songs were written about things as serious as animal abuse, drug induced insanity, struggles with artistic expression, the apocalypse, and finding someone who really understood me in the ways I need to be, to things as irreverent and stupid as complaining about the lackluster selection of spices in my parents' spice rack and learning martial arts from a tomato.

The songs were gloomy as fuck, sarcastically joyous, full of wacky time signatures, and almost all of the synth sounds came from this wild, beautiful and alien sounding subtractive/additive synthesis freeware plug-in. Actually, the company who made it not only discontinued allowing downloads of it, but made slightly less exciting, but statistically more powerful replacements (which I use on almost all of my material) and hid all remains of the original.
I'm baffled to this day by all of that...


There's no doubt the album had flaws, and many songs were left with slightly unfinished programming, awaiting better ideas for production and composition, but in my self-loathing and lethargy, coupled with the birth of my desire to re-record old songs for The Album Formerly Known As "8-Legged Dance Moves", I kind of had to toss the album I'd become so simultaneously hateful and proud of on the back burner, alongside 2006's Perfect Life & Other Stuff, 2007's Dawn and Dusk EPs, and literally about 200 or more songs in various stages of "what the fuck do I do with this?"

By the time I finished TAFKA'8LDM' and got it printed, it was too late for FTMPM.
I'd already begun working on the album I'm still most proud of, Sparkle Fountain.

Now I know, I do a lot of talking about albums that no one has heard anything off of unless they are my close friends or have seen me live on the few occasions I've taken the songs out for test drives... but I guess the point in doing that is to both:
A. Try to defend myself for not releasing anything for the first 4 years
and B. Let people know that even if I totally lose the ability or interest in writing new BgO material, I will still have a massive catalog of unheard material that I can dip into.


Anyway, back to the point.
Because BgO had developed beyond FTMPM, and because I was so bummed out about how I was being represented by material I wrote as a sophomore and junior in high school, I lost interest in making it the second full length.

Flashing forward, I was of course quite unsuccessful in recording vocals for Sparkle Fountain that I was happy with, leading me to scrap vocal arrangements and lyrics all together, all the while continuing to write songs that were slowly but surely moving away from the SF sound.
Thankfully, Chris (Yatagarasu) came along and we decided to do a split for our tour, which gave me a perfect opportunity to forget the things I was so dissatisfied with, and try writing and recording all new material completely experimentally.

It was a perfect learning experience. Taught me a lot about recording techniques, my own abilities as a recording artist, my ability to work under pressure, and that I actually can pull some shit off when I have a hard deadline.

I thought to myself "yeah, I can totally do Sparkle Fountain now," and I felt that way, all throughout the tour... that is, until I noticed I'd wrote tons of new material before, on, and right after the tour.

In typical m@ the c@ fashion, I ditched SF for the new album, Bad Happy.
This time, however, it was for slightly better reasons:

Aside from just needing to release material when I feel it most, Sparkle Fountain is a massive album. It's 22 songs, clocking in at about 55 minutes, and it requires me to go all out:
Vocal parts I have to practice with a tuner and a piano, screaming and growling that will require me to gargle broken glass, not to mention all of the instrument parts I will have to learn to play and, for some, even learn to record (glockenspiel, xylophone, tubular bells, timpani for example.)
I really do think that if one album will epitomize BgO, it will be Sparkle Fountain... but let's not think about it now. I get overwhelmed thinking about it.
(On the bright side, I do often play songs from it live though, and they're getting easier...)


As you can see, I tend to get sidetracked with my work for the project (as well as when I'm writing emails and blog entries.)
My ability to practice and record effectively is far outweighed by my ability to compose new material, and my desire to represent my current self accurately undermines my ability to... well... represent my current self accurately.


Back to the final point of this blog, I stumbled upon From The Magical Prince's Mouth tonight. I began to listen to the songs and I felt this overwhelming sense of elation.
How could I let songs as solid as some of these go to waste?
There is a level of forlornness and hopelessness that nothing I do now can match, and while dwelling on sadness and things like that is not my style, expressing it to get over it and possibly help others get out of it is, and FTMPM does just that.
I listened to the tracks over and over in alphabetical order before I began rearranging them into an actual track list.
There's no guarantee that the one I made tonight will be final, but I'm very happy with it, and I'm really starting to think that I am going to work on recording it.
It's going to require me getting my old computer working again or finding a PPC based Mac with OSX so I can use the plug-in, but I don't think that will be the biggest problem.
The split with Watabou and the split with Dental Work take top priority, but I am going to start rehearsing the songs so I can play them on this tour in April and possibly get them recorded before the end of 2010. It's a Wintery album, but who knows when I'll get it done.

Enough rambling from me.

I don't honestly know how much of this all makes sense, and I don't know how much of it is even worth reading... but hey, I never do.
I'm lost in sleepless dreaming.